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Humans, the Honey Hunters

Anthropologists have suggested early Homo was a meat-and-potatoes kind of hominid. Starting roughly 2.5 million years ago, early species of Homo were the first hominids to have brains bigger than an ape’s. But brains are expensive, metabolically speaking. To fuel their added brain power, these hominids probably introduced new energy-rich foods to their diet.

Researchers have long pointed to meat as the critical food that allowed for this initial brain expansion; after all, stone tools useful for hunting and butchering appear in the archaeological record at this time. More recently, the significance of underground tubers has been highlighted.

But another crucial food may have been honey. Alyssa Crittenden, a behavioral ecologist and nutritional anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, makes the case for the sweet liquid’s importance in the journal Food and Foodways.

Honey has several qualities that make it a super food, Crittenden points out. It’s very energy dense, about 80 to 95 percent sugar, and it’s a good source of the glucose needed to nurture brain development. Wild honey also contains traces of bee larvae, adding fat, protein, vitamins and minerals. And on top of that, it’s easy to digest.

The nutritional benefits of honey are clear, but there is no concrete evidence in the fossil record of hominids eating honey; honey consumption doesn’t leave behind the kind of scraps that can fossilize the way that hunting and butchering does. So Crittenden relies on some indirect clues to bolster her argument.

First, the significance of honey to human evolution may be inferred from the fact that the sugary liquid is an important dietary staple for people around the world. In Paraguay, for example, the Ache believe honey is the second most important food in their diet, after game meat; honey can provide an Ache with more than 1,100 calories per day.

Honey can constitute 80 percent of the calories consumed by the Efe pygmy people of the Congo and 15 percent of the diet of the Hadza of Tanzania. Furthermore, people go to great lengths to get honey.